atlas-bot

Atlas is a Discord bot for students at the Universität Duisburg-Essen (UDE), with a focus on Software Engineering / Informatik. It posts news from the SE groups, the Fakultät für Informatik and the central UDE feeds into your Discord channels, shows Mensa menus, and keeps the important study links close at hand.

Features

Command	What it does
/news sources	List all configured news sources, grouped (Software Engineering, Informatik, UDE)
/news latest <source> [count]	Show the newest items of a source right now
/news subscribe <source> [channel] [role]	Auto-post new items into a channel, optionally pinging a role (Manage Server)
/news unsubscribe <source> [channel]	Stop auto-posting (Manage Server)
/news subscriptions	Show this server's subscriptions
/mensa <Essen|Duisburg>	Today's menu of the Mensa at Campus Essen or Duisburg with student prices and diet tags, plus links to the weekly PDF plans (from stw-edu.de)
/links	Quick links: paluno, SSE, SE chair, Informatik, Moodle, HISinOne, ZIM, UB, …
/po <Neu – PO 2026|Alt – PO 2023>	Prüfungsordnung / Modulhandbuch for the B.Sc. Software Engineering, links configured in sources.yaml

News sources

Configured in sources.yaml:

• Software Engineering
  • paluno: paluno, the Ruhr Institute for Software Technology
  • sse: Software Systems Engineering
  • se-chair: Lehrstuhl für Software Engineering
  • softec: softec (RIS)
  • ude-se, ude-studium-se: the central UDE feeds, filtered by SE/Informatik keywords
• Informatik
  • informatik: news of the Fakultät für Informatik
• UDE
  • ude-studium, ude-aktuell, ude-forschung, ude-presse, ude-press-en: central UDE newsfeeds

Most faculty and chair websites don't publish RSS. For those, Atlas uses type: html and watches the news overview page for new links. It keeps only links whose URL matches link_pattern and whose text is at least min_title_len characters, which filters out navigation links. When a source is first subscribed, Atlas only records what is already there. After that it posts at most 5 new items per source per check, so a page redesign can't flood a channel.

To add a source, add an entry to sources.yaml and restart the bot. /news latest is a quick way to check that a new source parses the way you expect.

Setup

1. Create an application at https://discord.com/developers/applications, add a Bot, and copy its token.
2. Invite it with the scopes bot and applications.commands. It needs the permissions Send Messages, Embed Links and, if you want role pings for roles that aren't mentionable, Mention Everyone.
3. Configure and run:

cp .env.example .env          # put DISCORD_TOKEN in here
python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m atlas

Set ATLAS_DEV_GUILD_ID to your server's ID while developing so slash commands show up immediately. Global sync can take up to an hour.

Docker

docker build -t atlas-bot .
docker run -d --name atlas --env-file .env -v atlas-data:/app/data atlas-bot

Configuration

Variable	Default
DISCORD_TOKEN	–	required
ATLAS_DEV_GUILD_ID	–	sync commands to one server instantly
ATLAS_POLL_MINUTES	15	how often subscribed sources are checked
ATLAS_DB_PATH	data/atlas.db	SQLite file for subscriptions and seen items
ATLAS_SOURCES_FILE	sources.yaml	news sources, links and PO documents

Development

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
pytest

Layout:

• atlas/feeds.py: fetches sources and parses RSS and HTML pages
• atlas/poller.py: finds new items and fans them out to subscribed channels
• atlas/storage.py: SQLite storage for subscriptions and seen items
• atlas/mensa.py: menu parser for stw-edu.de (Mensa Campus Essen and Duisburg)
• atlas/cogs/: the Discord slash commands (news, mensa, links)